DIY: Cute, cheap, no-sew cubbie curtains!

I have had this dilemma in my classroom for quite some time now: bare cubbies. These aren't really cubbies the students use; they are a bit above their heads. They are mainly storage space for me. I would never complain about having storage space, but I will complain about the way it looks. All year long last year, I kept thinking about how I could cover those cubbies without spending a fortune on fabric. You see, these cubbies line the entire back wall of my classroom. That's a lot of space to cover with material. Fabric, as we know, is not exactly cheap. I'm not opposed to spending money; I just want to spend as little of it as possible. ;)

Originally, I looked for sales on fabric. I thought it was possible that I could come across something that would fit the colors/style I wanted and not pay a fortune for it. It seemed like everything I found was the right colors, but the wrong style or the right style, but the wrong colors, or the right style/colors, but the wrong price. In the end, I found nothing.

I thought about using bed sheets. So for a while, I looked for cute sheets that might serve as curtain-like material. However, aside from thick cotton sheets (which all seemed to be solid colors and more costly) sheets were generally too thin to create the appearance I really wanted. So, again, nothing.

Finally, the idea crossed my mind... What about table cloths?? In my first visit to Wal-Mart, I found a striped vinyl tablecloth that contained colors that would fit my classroom nicely, and an 84-inch cloth cost just under $5. Based on the width of the tablecloth (60 inches), I thought I could fold it in half and actually make two strips of curtains, both of which would be 84 inches long, using only one of those table cloths and spending less than $5 on the material.

I picked up two of those tablecloths, for good measure.

During my next visit to Hobby Lobby, I found a cute ribbon to use as trim. You know, Hobby Lobby offers great half-off sales on ribbon. Two spools for $3.99 isn't bad at all. That brought my total cost for the curtains to under $15.00. 

Some of you may think I'm extremely cheap. Others, teachers, will understand that a classroom is a costly investment, and any venture that costs less that $15 and adorns an entire wall of cubbies is just a blessing.

Follow these four simple steps to create your own cubbie curtains!

I used velcro rounds to secure the curtains along my cubbies. The teacher before me used the same ones for her curtains, and one side of the adhesive was still attached to the cubbies. So half of the job was done for me! Here are some before-and-after pics:

India's Research Output: Quantity increases are sustainable, but enhancing quality is a bigger challenge

India’s share of world research output (3.5% in 2010) has been on an increasing trend since the late 1990s, but this growth is completely overshadowed by that of China. The citation impact of India’s research, though rising, continues to be below the world average. These are the main findings of a recent study undertaken by Thomson Reuters on behalf of the Indian government’s Department of Science & Technology (DST).

Access to Relevant Innovation Indicators

When I first started formal study of India’s innovation system a decade ago, finding relevant data on key innovation indicators was a major challenge. The global comparative studies of innovation such as the Global Innovation Index had not started at that time, databases were not that powerful, and even when databases existed, our access to them was limited. India’s own statistics painstakingly compiled by the Department of Science & Technology were restricted to research and development narrowly defined, and available with a lag of a few years. Given these data limitations, tracking trends in any kind of time frame that would be useful to policy-makers was a difficult, if not impossible, task.

Fortunately, that situation has changed. Globally, databases have become more sophisticated, database vendors see India as an important market, and are therefore making a serious effort to compile and present data that is relevant to us (and other developing/emerging market countries). Perhaps most important is the fact that policy-makers today realize the importance of such data in informing policy formulation.

Measuring Research Output

As I discussed in From Jugaad to Systematic Innovation, one of the important innovation indicators for any country is its research output. The simplest measure of a country’s research output is the number of research papers published by people working within its borders. While not all research is necessarily “useful,” a vibrant research community that furthers the stock of knowledge is considered an important pre-requisite of a modern nation. In R&D-intensive fields such as Biotechnology and Nanotechnology, this research activity often feeds into industrial innovation – e.g. today new drug discovery draws directly from the latest advances in different sub-fields of Biology. The ability to publish in journals with a strong review process indicates that scientists have inculcated the scientific method.

During a recent web search, I was pleasantly surprised to find a fascinating report on India’s research publication output during the period 2000-2010. This report reflects the results of a study undertaken by Thomson Reuters for the DST, and the DST’s conclusions from the study. Thomson Reuters is particularly well placed to make such a study as its Web of Science is one of the best regarded publication databases in the world. Only journals that are published regularly and have a credible review and selection process are a part of the Web of Science. (A competitive offering, Scopus, covers a larger and more geographically dispersed set of journals, but has been in existence for a shorter period of time and hence is not as useful to track long-term trends).

India’s scientific output, particularly vis-à-vis China, has been a subject of concern to the Indian science academies, the Scientific Advisory Council to the PM and the Indian government for some time. The first time I was exposed to these concerns was 7 or 8 years ago when I was invited by Dr. Mashelkar to speak on trends in China at a brainstorming session organized by the Indian National Science Academy in Delhi. It’s good to see the government diving into the details, and I hope we’ll see policy actions directed towards these issues.

Highlights of the Recent Thomson Reuters Report

• In 2010, India’s share of world research output was 3.5%.
• India’s share of world’s research output was on a decline from 3.1% in 1981 till the mid-1990s, and regained the 3.1% mark only in 2007. The current trend is therefore an ascending one. [As a benchmark, China’s share of world publications increased from 2.5% in 1996 to 11.7% in 2010, placing it at #2 globally!].
• In terms of disciplines, India’s share of world publications was highest in Agricultural Sciences, Plant and Animal Sciences and Chemistry in 1981. In 2010, the three disciplines in which India had the highest shares were Chemistry, Materials Science and Agricultural Sciences.
• Indian research still has relatively low impact, though this has improved over time. In 1981-85, India’s citation impact was 0.35 (compared to a world average of 1). By 2006-10, this had improved to 0.68.
• The disciplines in which Indian research has the highest citation impact are Psychiatry/Psychology (0.99), Engineering (0.95) and Physics (0.82). This means that the citation impact of research in India is below the world average in every discipline, but in at least two disciplines we are approaching the world average,
• In the period 2006-10, 20% of Indian papers received more than the world average of citations, and 35% received less than the world average. 45% of Indian papers received no citations at all.
• 2.7% of India’s papers received more than 4 times the world average of citations, and are labeled as highly cited papers. In 2006-10, Engineering had the highest proportion of highly cited papers (6.5%) and shows an upward trend on this dimension, while both Chemistry and Physics showed a downward trend in highly cited papers.
• India has 2.3% of the world’s researchers and accounts for 1.6% of world spending on R&D. India’s spending on R&D per researcher is about 80% more than that of China, but about half that of the US (in 2007, in PPP dollar terms).

What Needs to be Done

The good news from this report is clearly that the downward trend of research output that began in 1981 was arrested by the mid-1990s, and India’s research output has subsequently been on an upward trajectory. It is important that this trajectory be maintained.

The efforts in recent years to improve funding for Science & Technology, enhance the working conditions in academia and research institutions, and evangelise science education appear to have paid off. The government has programmes like INSPIRE that provide encouragement to budding young scientists. Tighter accreditation of the universities under the revised NAC guidelines and the new appraisal processes for faculty introduced by the UGC should also create pressure to enhance research output across disciplines. So, overall, I suspect that volume increases will not be difficult to sustain.

However, increasing quality is a much trickier issue. Here a more focused effort may be required. The Thomson Reuters report has classified different fields according to a combination of output and impact. There are three fields – Engineering, Physics and Materials Science – that are the “stars,” i.e. above the Indian average on both share of world research output and citation impact. These may be the best bets for the future. Three other fields – Psychology, Computing and the Social Sciences are above average on citation impact but not on output – these offer the opportunity to scale up without losing quality. Of course, a more careful examination of resources, distinctive research opportunities from India, and the existence of a critical mass of researchers will be required before research priorities can be decided upon.

Having higher impact is also related to which journals you publish in. Journals with high impact factors tend to have larger citation impact. Building the right research agendas, being a part of the right networks, skills and aspirations to publish in the top journals are important to be successful in such an endeavor. Some incentivisation to target higher impact journals may also help. At IIMB, our research incentives that are sharply skewed in favour of publishing in higher ranked journals have had some positive impact.

In expanding research output, we need to take some precautions as well. One is to make sure that we guard against fraud. Increased pressure for research performance and incentives linked to output will put our academics whose research skills are poor or rusty at a disadvantage. Some of them may be tempted to resort to fraud to meet institutional requirements for promotion. India is already known as a major source of research fraud, and we will need to put in place better verification and validation processes if we need to prevent this from spreading. A second and related measure is to put in place support systems like mentoring and faculty development programmes to help faculty sharpen their research skills.

On Au

Click here to read my column in Sunday's NY Times.

The topic is whether you should invest in gold as part of your portfolio.  After you read the column, you might find the following problem of interest.  It is based on roughly plausible assumptions.

Imagine that you start off with a portfolio of 60 percent stocks and 40 percent bonds.  The returns on stocks, bonds, and gold are uncorrelated.  Stocks earn a higher expected return than bonds.  Bonds and gold earn the same lower expected return, but gold returns are three times as volatile as bond returns, as measured by the standard deviation.  You want to minimize risk, measured by the variance of your portfolio return, without changing the expected return on your portfolio. How much gold should you buy?

I will leave this problem as an exercise for the reader.  But I believe you should be able to come up with a precise numerical answer without resorting to a computer.

Update: Albert Zevelev, a grad student at Penn, posts the correct answer here.

How Coffee Became a Tree...

Well, okay, I didn't really turn coffee into a tree. (Had you fooled for a minute, though, didn't I?!?) This is another DIY idea, and it has probably been one of my favorites so far. Do you remember, way back when I designed my business cards? (If you missed that post, you can check it out here.) Well, at that time, I mentioned that I wanted to display my cards on some type of tree. That's really where this whole idea began. I needed a tree... sort of.

There really isn't much to this project, but I just love the way it turned out. Unfortunately, I don't have the most thorough tutorial to offer. The truth is that I attempted this a bit blindly... I just made it up as I went along. I wasn't really sure that it would turn into what I had envisioned, so I didn't really plan to create a tutorial for this one ahead of time. Now that it's finished, though, I just have to share it with you! I have several pictures to help the process, so I am pretty confident you'll still follow the process pretty easily.

Step one: Start with a large coffee can. Strip the labels.

Step two: Cover the can with a material of your choice. I used scrapbook paper because that's what I had at the time, but you could easily use fabric if you wanted. Secure the material along the edges with hot glue.

 Step three: Add embellishments.

Step four: Add tree stems.
These are literally dead sticks from our yard.  My husband was kind enough to gather them for me, and they were just perfect. I used the floral-arrangement foam from Hobby Lobby to secure the stems. Then I covered the top with a scrap of burlap.

Step five: Prepare business cards to hang! This is the really fun part. I found these cute little paper envelopes at Hobby Lobby. My business cards fit into them perfectly. I punched a hole in the top of each one and looped twine through the hole.

Step six: Hang business cards on the tree! This was almost as much fun as decorating a Christmas tree. Almost. 

Is Technopessimism Bunk?

Yes, says Joel Mokyr.

When money is tight

I don’t know about you, but there have been times in my life when money was T.I.G.H.T. I mean, on the floor of the car, reaching under the seats, trying to find a dollar in change to get enough gas to get me home or to work. (That’s when gas was cheap!) ;)

I learned a few BIG things over those years – one, not having money is one of the scariest, most unsettling feelings ever. It makes you feel completely out of control of your life. But I realized there were certain things I could do that would make me feel like I had control again and doing those things would help tremendously.

Although things are different for me now, there are certainly still times when cash is low – we are adjusting to a definite change since my hubby has retired from teaching. We planned for it and know things will even out so it’s not a scary situation, but it’s easy for those feelings of fear creep back in. It’s silly because my situation is completely different from years ago, but when the bank account goes low and the budget is spent for the month, I can’t help but feel that again, just a little. I will for as long as I live – you just don’t forget that feeling. :)

There are a few things that I’ve always done at times like that – and each of them gives me a sense of having control over my life. The first one may sound a little unusual – but it’s always worked for me.

I clean my car. :)

Now, my car is the thorn in my organizational side. It is just a space that easily gets messy and full of STUFF and I let it get out of control all. the. time. My husband does too. Maybe it’s the creative side of us? ;)

Back in the day it was my mom’s car that I would do this with, but I would gather up change from around the house (or the car!) and drive to the car wash place and use their vacuum. I know you can do this at home and save a couple bucks, but for me it’s always getting out and driving there that helps too. When you don’t have any cash you’re not getting out as much so the drive was usually much needed.

I did this the other day and it ALWAYS makes me feel better – just throwing trash away, vacuuming the whole thing – it seriously works! If you are extra ambitious you can get even more detailed with it and maybe clean the outside (at home with the hose). But I’m rarely that good. ;)

It’s just a little thing but to this day it makes me feel better!

Depending on the state of your car, the next one goes hand in hand, and it’s to purge. Or decrapify as I like to say. If you’re like me you’re not always totally on top of stuff around the house when you’re feeling down about something. And again…I think what’s most important when money is tight is to feel like you have control over your home and life.

Going through the closets, the cabinets, the clothes and losing a few pounds of stuff feels SO GOOD. I cannot stress how amazing it feels when you see a pile ready to go out the door:

Maybe this is just me? All I know is it makes me feel so accomplished, so light and ready to conquer the world.

I wrote a post years ago about what to do with all that stuff too – you may just make some cash from that pile! I break it down into a few different areas – consignment, donation and recycling.

And finally, one that goes hand in hand with purging – organizing what’s left. Like decluttering, it won’t cost you anything! I mean, of course you can always add pretty baskets or organization, but most of the time just reassessing what you already have is enough: 

  

You can get creative with scrap wood, shoe or diaper boxes – whatever! Make labels with your printer or paint chips or scrapbook paper – it doesn’t have to be fancy!

Next month my plan is to get the house decluttered once again! I want to get it done before school gets going in full gear and before the birthdays and holidays later this year. I’m so motivated right now – I don’t know why but I feel like it’s spring instead of late(ish) summer. I have this desire to clean out and organize the whole house!

So what do you do when funds are low? Do you have any go to projects like my car clean out? Like I mentioned, I learned over the years that, for me, the way to fight the fear that comes with financial stress is to figure out something that makes me feel like I have power over my life – and all of these things do that for me, whether money is tight or not!

Have a GREAT weekend!!

A Tale of Two Political Systems

Here is a fascinating TED talk about the Chinese political culture.  It takes about 20 minutes.

Addendum: And here is a thoughtful commentary on the talk.